to the disappointment of my brother, there will be no downtime this weekend, which means i was able to fix my machine last night. yes, this also means i will not be forced to buy a new computer.

now, how i went about fixing the thing. last night i decided to start backing up all of my stuff in preparation for the weekend when i realized something. At the time, i was using carbon copy cloner (whose site is currently down for some reason) to do a complete backup of my boot drive when i remembered a trick that was used back in the mac os 10.3 days. The trick involved getting an os x install on a case-sensitive hfs+ filesystem. since it was not yet an option for formatting at the time, it was discovered that you could install os x on a drive, use ccc to back up the drive on another drive, reformat the original drive as a case-sensitive hfs+ filesystem using the command line, then use ccc to copy everything back over to the newly formatted drive.

the way that i figured it, i could use the same method, but in reverse. this would be my way of getting my boot drive back to regular hfs+. so i used the above method, but instead reformatted the drive to regular hfs+ so that i could give diskwarrior a shot. i had a feeling that this process may solve the problem anyway and sure enough, it worked (the whole process took about an hour and a half). i did however run diskwarrior to be on the safe side figuring it may find some issues anyway. it did, and i got everything repaired.

making sure it worked, i tested out some of the quirkiness that i had been seeing. safari no longer bombs out on the pages that it was doing so on, and everything appears to be perfectly stable again. i even used isquint to encode a folder full of shows overnight since this was the app that caused the stress that lead to the last kernel panic. this morning, no kernel panic, and isquint had completed its job. all looks well, but the last quirky thing i need to test out is a video chat with my father. i was able to do a video chat with my brother without an issue, but it would fail with my father even though my brother and father could video chat with each other. i will test that one out over the next few days. hopefully all will go well.

although i probably went into way too much detail, i know that at least my brother would be interested in knowing what i had done to solve the problem, so if for no other reason, i wrote all this for him and myself. also, you never know when a simple google search may bring someone here and help them out.